


acta non verba

by nonbinarywithaknife (littleboxes)



Series: just let them REST alex [10]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Artemis (Rusty Quill Gaming) - Freeform, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Grizzop heals but it's mostly off screen, Introspection, Sad, The Cult of Artemis (Mentioned), The Fall Of Rome, The inherent tragedy of the rome arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22804387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleboxes/pseuds/nonbinarywithaknife
Summary: grizzop is the one who makes it out of rome.
Relationships: Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam & Artemis, Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam & Sasha Racket
Series: just let them REST alex [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1514891
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	acta non verba

**Author's Note:**

> latin title means 'deeds not words'

grizzop sees as the spear breaks sasha’s skin, and he reaches for his god, feels the pull of her magic, knows the sacrifice he’s about to make and makes it willingly- _protect the pack_ \- but-

it doesn’t work. the magic fizzles out and grizzop looks at sasha, gasping on the ground, and knows it’s too late, and feels the tears begin to fall. 

he doesn’t run over to her, though he wants to, instead he turns and faces the men surrounding him. they’re going to kill him- grizzop knows his skills and knows he is good, but they have him surrounded and that fancy bastard is still smirking at him, and grizzop knows he will not make it out of this alive but Artemis damn him if that smug fucker isn’t _coming down with him_.

grizzop nocks an arrow and nocks an arrow and his fingers are beginning to bleed from the strain but since when has he been bothered by a little blood? 

he loses himself to the haze of it- falls into the familiar pattern of _grab, nock, point, shoot_ and he ignores the growing amount of wounds covering him and the way he’s beginning to feel a little faint, and every time he hears the _thunk-scream_ of one of his arrows hitting his smile gets a little sharper.

he doesn’t know how long he’s been standing- not standing, shifting, never staying still, even surrounded on all sides, spears jabbing his sides- when there’s a horrendous tremor and the ground- it doesn’t shake. it’s so much more violent than that. it feels like the earth is _ripping itself apart beneath him_ and that’s enough to break grizzop’s concentration. 

(the smug bastard is dead, the smirk wiped from his cold face and instead replaced with eyes wide with fear and grizzop feels a jolt of satisfaction at a goal attained. job done. there are too many arrows lodged in his chest, his shoulders, one or two in his throat, even, and it makes grizzop a little irrational, staring at the arrows and wishing he could take them out to use them on something more worthy of being killed by them, but he can’t take them back. and they’re just arrows, anyway.)

but there’s no time for waiting, not while the next tremor throws grizzop and everyone around him off their feet and _harshly_ onto the ground. grizzop lands and hears the snap of other people’s bones breaking and catches himself and thinks, _sasha could’ve done that even better_ , and he doesn’t look to his left where he wouldn’t be able to see her body through the dust clouds rising in the air anyway. 

he takes a second to scan the area anyway and after some squinting can see now, what’s causing it. the yawning pit beneath them is coming apart, being _clawed_ apart, by vicious, ruthless, _angry_ claws, and grizzop spares a thought to wonder if he’s going to survive being teleported 1000 years into the past and assaulted by waves of cultists only to die at the hands of the _meritocrats_. 

(sasha didn’t survive it, he thinks, and _shoves_ the thought away. later. he can break down _later_ , when he’s not alone, in the middle of the fall of one of the greatest civilizations in his history.) 

(he’s never really been alone. even after- after, he was taken in by the cult, lived in a temple that was always busy, always doing something, teaching or being taught, and then there was vesseek, with their sharpness and their _care_ , and grizzop has never really been alone, before, never not had a pack to protect, before- even alone in damascus he’d known that the others were (probably) alive, and then he’d had the orcs to be surrounded by-

except he _still does_. the cult will, he knows even with his basic knowledge of history, be fractured and quiet, for a while, after the fall all of them will be, but as long as grizzop has Artemis, he will _never_ be alone, and with that thought, he makes himself get up.)

he makes himself move, get further from what is soon going to be more dust in the air or a killing ground, and watches as the black dragon heaves in an enormous breath and then the air _crackles_ and it becomes both.

his ears pop and his eyes burn but the rest of him _doesn’t_ and that’s a win. the soldiers (cultists?) aren’t as lucky, and when he can see properly again, they’re husks in the midst of falling into a seemingly bottomless cavern. 

the dragons are mostly loose, now, and they’ve begun to rampage. there’s a hole in the ceiling (the ground?) that’s dropping rubble at a precariously accelerating pace and grizzop hopes he’s small enough they won’t notice him. he presses his hand against the crescent moon that’s hanging from his neck and sends up a prayer and then he _runs_.

he heads toward the hole- there’s so much _screaming_ , the dragons are screaming in rage and the soldiers are screaming as they’re incinerated and the people are screaming in terror and grizzop blocks it out and thinks _get out_ -

and he’s heading toward the hole and he’s going to get out and then he stumbles and looks down and it’s-

sasha (it’s not sasha, not really. grizzop knows everything that made sasha _sasha_ is gone, and what’s lying there is just a husk, but his breath still hitches when he sees it) is face down on the ground and just as pale as she was in cairo, before the heart, and grizzop hates that he’s seen her like this before except this time there’s no way for him to fix it, and grizzop _does not have time_ but screams are ringing in his ears and dragon-breath of fire and lightning and acid is raging around him and _sasha is dead_ and he crouches down. 

he reaches into her pockets and can feel the daggers hidden- in her coat and her pockets, in sheaths along her arms and ankles, but he searches until he finds one he recognizes. damascus adamantine, just as shiny as it was the day she stole it, and he shoves it in his pocket. 

a dead woman has no use for an adamantine dagger, never mind the other thirteen of varying quality. he knows she’d’ve understood, and then told him how stupid it was for him to stop running out of a collapsing city to close her eyes, but grizzop closes her eyes, and sends a prayer to Artemis to watch over her soul, and then he leaves her body behind. 

there is a lot of running, after that. 

grizzop makes it out of rome, and watches as it falls. he doesn’t grieve the city, but he does grieve the woman buried beneath it, and wonders if the ruins of a city count as a headstone. 

he roams for a while, in the direct aftermath, but grizzop has never been one to be directionless, and so in the absence of a purpose, he makes one. 

he starts to search out survivor camps. they’re scared of him, at first, some of them. they’ve never seen a goblin before and he doesn’t speak their language very well- he gets better. he suspects Artemis' help, so he thanks her and tells the scared ones to shut up so he can heal them. and they do. their city is ash and rubble now and the sky is a bleeding, angry red and the air crackles with magic that feels _wrong_ and what’s one more thing for them to get used to, really?

 _guard the pack, so that you will succeed together_. 

grizzop’s pack is dead, or so far unborn they may as well be dead (although he doesn’t think about that often. he misses them, he _aches_ with how much he misses them, but he is here, and he knows he won’t be going home, and so he goes about his task and if the way a little gnome boy smiles reminds him of hamid, well, that’s his business, and he moves on to the next one and tries not to think about how hamid took their disappearance.)

grizzop’s pack is dead, but as he makes his way through the survivors, teaching them how to shoot a bow and make a campfire and search the environment for edible things, he gains a reputation. they know him. 

grizzop’s pack is dead, but he cobbles together another one from the scarred and broken landscape he resides in. they are not the same. the scarred romans that greet him and house him and proudly show him the mutated squirrel-like creatures they shot and roasted are not sasha and her quiet, knife-quick smiles and long nights on roofs, or hamid and his tears and his laughter and his love, or azu and her hugs and her softness and her _presence_ , but they are _here_ and they are _something_. 

and slowly, achingly slowly, grizzop heals. it is the slowest thing he has ever done, and it is painful and frustrating, but that has never stopped him from doing something before and so it does not now.

grizzop is holding a piece of paper tightly in his hand and staring in the direction he knows, vaguely, that egypt is in. he’s old, thirty-three exactly, which is longer than he’d expected and still feels like not _enough_ , and he knows he has to go. 

he doesn’t know if apophis will even listen to him. but if there’s a chance- a chance that he could give hamid and azu a little closure, how can he not take it?

the journey out of rome and up to egypt is- hard. and slow. grizzop grits his teeth and deals with it, because if the fall of rome and its aftermath couldn’t kill him, a _trip north_ sure as hell isn’t. it still takes a while though.

once he gets to egypt, he doesn’t have to ask around very far to learn that apophis has made his home a ways out in the desert. which is a _delightful_ trip that grizzop curses all the way through. 

he makes it, though, to the spot of desert that apophis is. there are rocks here, old formations that curve and shift that the dragon’s scales twist around. grizzop knocks on one and calls out, “anybody home?” 

the letter is still safe in his pocket, and he squeezes it tighter. apophis shrinks down into a humanoid shape that’s somewhat familiar, and grizzop talks at him until he agrees. 

not until there’s been a sufficient amount of suspicion and growling and other myriad ways to show how little apophis trusts him, and grizzop supposes it’s understandable given what humanoids did to him for so long, but grizzop is persuasive (insistent. annoying. telling the truth, and surrounded by a cloud of magic that is old and smells like time and space in a way that makes apophis want to sneeze) and so apophis takes the letter and grizzop leaves feeling satisfied and sad and so very, very _old_. 


End file.
